[ On Monday, October 14, 2002 at 12:58:10 (-0400), Dan Melomedman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: FYI: upgrading GNU tar
>
> Unless this has changed recently, AMANDA also can only support either
> dump or GNU tar.

You have the amanda source.  It's not really that hard to adjust for
other tar implementations, though ideally it would be adjusted once and
for all to expect a portable tool like 'pax'.  :-)

> I can't tell it to use something else oh a whim - like
> 'star' which is the best tar program available.

flame bait?  Obviously 'pax' is now the best 'tar' program available!  ;-)

(seriously "dump" is the best backup program available for *BSD.  I'm
not even 100% sure POSIX 2001 extended headers can correctly represent
all the semantics of a *BSD filesytem in a )

(Less seriously the Star author can't even get his facts straight.
There can be no such thing as a "POSIX.1-2001 compliant tar
implementation."  Even the archive format is called "ustar", not "tar",
unless it's called "pax" or "cpio".  But then that may just be a
misunderstanding due to the author's native language not being English. :-)

(a wee bit more seriously, NetBSD's pax does admittedly have a bit of a
way to go yet before it's up-to-snuff with the latest POSIX revisions --
but that's something that I'll be working on if nobody beats me to it)

> It can also only use
> gzip for compression - unless this has changed recently.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "recently".  Amanda has had
support for multiple compression filters ever since 2.4.1-b1 (i.e. well
before 2.4.1 final release), and in the CVS sources since the fall of
1999.

> Also AMANDA security is a joke, and the whole system is too loose -

Security?  It's certainly good enough if you trust the security of your
local LAN.  Surely you are not trying to make your backup system cross
an insecure network, are you?

Besides, Amanda is at least as secure even in its least secure
configuration as (and can be much more secure than) rmt.

> there's too much guessing done by the scheduler among other ad-hockery.

more flame-bait?  :-)

> But so far it's been 'good enough' for me.

I thought you must be just picking nits!  ;-)

> What I am looking for is a
> simple yet flexible site-wide backup tools, and yet to find them. Has
> anyone tried afbackup?

"simple yet flexible site-wide backup tools" is one of those sets of
requirements that goes with the rule "Pick any two."

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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